Yonders
Species - War Construct - Interplanetary - the Other Yonders, also called bounds, endings, limits, peripheres, or a variety of other names spoken in whispers, are vast ethereal constructs used as both mass monitors and war machines by Jvan. Their typical appearance from 'outside' is that of a cloudy or hazy shape, sometimes with a passing resemblance to their natal host. This cloud bears certain marks or features according to what the conscious larva was most readily visualised as by the host prior to maturation. These features may be skulls, large, staring eyes, faceless lines of teeth, or luminous sigils. These ghostly forms typically occupy at least one or two thousand metres cubed, but readily shrink and overlap with other Yonders. Counting faces in a Yonder cloud is a semi-reliable way of judging their numbers when they are at rest.
The 'interior' of a Yonder is an extradimensional space occupying at least a kilometre cubed. This space is edgeless, generating endlessly around the location of any entity with the misfortune to be lost inside. New terrain is continually grown as the prisoner moves. The 'exterior' body of the Yonder is also present in its 'interior'.
Yonder prisons are unsafe regions filled with creatively distorted facsimiles of what the natal host knew. Lakes, forests, deserts, mountains, cities and all other forms of typical landscape can be found here, but elements of them may intersect or be constructed in wholly unnatural ways. Space may warp and mirror, distortions of gravity are common, living things behave in unliving ways, and inanimate terrain may not be so.
The interior of a Yonder also distorts time. Depending on how strained the Yonder is to preserve its internal territory, it can slow or speed time around a helpless mortal by factors of ten or more.
Some examples of a Yonder seen from outside may be found
here.
Boo.Life Cycle: Yonders pass through three distinct life phases on their way to power. An adult Yonder is composed of a haze of hyperdimensional spores. At the end of their lifespan these spores occasionally shed, and can be inhaled by wandering mortals, though the chances of infection are low and the spores do not incubate for long.
Once inhaled, the newborn Yonder exists only as a construct of the host's imagination. The host mortal begins to unwillingly use their mind's eye to project strange and hazardous features onto the world as perceived by their senses, first in glimpses and pareidolia, increasing rapidly in intensity and realism over the course of a few days external time. In time these glimpses become a constant stream of hallucinations affecting all senses. Once the internal world, not yet fully existent, is sufficiently unrecognisable from the host's environment, the developing Yonder pupates by quickly and quietly pulling the host into hyperbolic space.
The host may spend a considerable amount of time here, wandering Yonder space and further developing the periphere's library of potential weapons. Inevitably, the Yonder matures enough to exist outside of the host, and pulls the hallucinatory landscapes away, exiting the host body in the form of an adult spore cloud and taking the host's creative soul with it.
The abandoned host body is equipped with a handful of complex psychic algorithms that adaptively corroborate the body's actions with memories, old and new, held in its brain. This allows a soulless body to pass for a relatively normal and entirely competent, if rather simple, person. The algorithms are quite resistant to total failure but are known to be riddled with glitches. Soulless bodies, for example, don't retain any natural fear of Other-based entities they may have had, and may bear elementary knowledge of Jvanic history and philosophy.
The mature Yonder will seek out others of its kind, locating them by unknown impulse, and spend much of its life in such a colony. Adults sometimes flee to populated regions out of loneliness and nostalgia, and swiftly return, having left spores unwittingly. Yonders are susceptible to encrypted signals sent by All-Beauty, which they will follow without question. They are not known to die naturally.
Description: The adult Yonder is capable of rapid movement through all but the densest media, and does not need to eat or breathe. Though they are limited to speeds of a few hundred kilometres per hour or so in air at surface pressure, they can rapidly achieve orbital velocity once the atmosphere thins.
Yonders can 'settle', 'rooting' themselves in to a location and taking any engulfed mortal entities with them into the Yonder places. Once settled, a Yonder exists mostly hyperdimensionally and is extremely difficult to notice or identify, though the location it occupies in three-dimensional space does not change. Yonders cannot engulf mortals unless settled, although they may engulf additional mortals once settled.
As Yonders tend to be affectionate entities when surrounded by their own kind, they don't mind existing in close contact with other peripheres, and a colony may temporarily fuse if need be. While this action may or may not fuse the 'exterior' of the Yonders, it will conglomerate the Yonder places into a far larger and more diverse hellscape with substantially greater regenerative properties.
Yonders can be killed by targeting their spores when they are not settled, although their supply is near limitless and they flee confrontation by scattering spacewards or settling. A settled Yonder, likewise, can be killed by destroying its peripheral landscape. Though impossible for lone or magically inept mortals, an army or magician may be able to defend themselves from the traps and monsters thrown at them, while destroying elements of the Yonder place faster than it can regrow. It is absolutely critical they they do not travel far when they do this- leaving behind any part of the Yonder place will dissipate it, and the damage one has done to it, and allow its mass to be recycled freely into new terrain.
Interactions: Yonders are by nature shy, and recluse to their dark spaces at the edge of the populated universe if so given a chance. They can communicate only by telepathic means, and even then only in encrypted code, understood not even by Sculptors. Mouths formed within the Yonder places typically speak gibberish or regurgitated mortal memories, which may be used to set traps.
They do respond to Sculptor signals, though, and the artists may use Yonder companions as a mobile
studio lair.
Adult Yonders mean no harm to the average wanderer, and may permit them to enter their special places and exit unharmed. They may even help struggling travellers who need a place of rest, though they are poorly equipped to provide it. Yonders open their gates to travelling Voidsketchers compulsively. Fiberlings are the only currently known entities capable of existing inside a Yonder place that is not at rest. There may, however, be others.
Unlike ordinary matter, change-eaters are capable of growing and reproducing if fed with the matter present within Yonders.
Yonders treasure keepsakes of their former lives, and will defend and hide them deep within the yonder places, mourning their loss. They cannot bear to be reunited with the bodies of their natal hosts.
Names are the only aspect of Yonder language that have been readily translated, as the Yonder retains the name of its host prior to maturation.
